ABSTRACT
The divided-brain model of Iain McGilchrist is introduced and developed. McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist, has posited that each brain hemisphere presents a distinctly different view to the acting human. The right captures and presents incoming, ever-changing, instantaneous signals from the external world as a whole, while the left stores and accesses images and information abstracted from and re-presenting past experiences. Further, the nature of individual and collective [cultural] character depends on which side dominates. The pathologies of modernity, according to McGilchrist, are due to a reversal in the primordial dominance of the interconnected right hemisphere, allowing the disconnected, abstractive left to take control. The emergence of flourishing depends on recovering the mastery of the right—the source of authentic, caring behavior. McGilchrist’s model, based on a veritable mountain of clinical data, has the ring of pragmatic truth, with a powerful explanatory range and broad implications for the two key practical themes of the book: 1) practices to rebalance the hemispheres, and 2) the design of institutions and technology that would allow enable, not suppress, flourishing.
